"This was a record that Chris Taylor or Chris Bear introduced me to in college. We were eighteen or nineteen in New York, they were studying music and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing! I was trying to be serious about linguistics but I was kind of bullshitting myself. “I’d started writing songs but I was very secretive about it and didn’t take it seriously. I played them to Chris Taylor, he was probably the first person who heard anything I’d done, but I refused to admit to myself that I took it seriously in any real way. When I went to college I decided I wasn’t going to do music, because there was no reason for another white kid to play jazz guitar. I ended up finding songwriting instead and it became a different thing. “This is a reference point we’ve talked about over the years, when one of us mentions this record, everybody knows what we’re talking about, we talked about it on Painted Ruins in certain places. The whole basis of the groove is built on an organ drum machine and the sound of it is very ahead of its time. It’s very groovy but it’s not beating you over the head, it’s an emotional tune that has this subtly danceable beating heart. There’s a soulfulness and dreaminess to it, it accesses the emotional part of you with this really pointed and tight rhythmic quality. “We never wanted to approach music from a folky songwriter’s standpoint. Certain parts of our music have come out that way because of what we play, but it’s remembering what it was like as a teenager, being really into music from a players’ perspective and finding the emotional quality in that, trying to build something that’s soulful and hits you without beating you over the head. I love it when people can pull off that subtlety, where they’re barely touching the instrument but there’s this rhythmic quality to it. “’Aht Uh Mi Hed’ is a touchstone that’s stuck with us, it’s an aspect of music that we really appreciate. We don’t actively strive towards it, but it never quite leaves our minds."

"Continuing the otherworldly theme, as we’re looking chronologically at our lives and youth, this is the next song that hit me as a young person, at the age of seven or eight. The reason it hit me so hard, so young, was because it was one of the first songs that I understood was about death. “I grew up in the Catskill Mountains and Grasshopper grew up in Lake Erie, so we were well away from New York, punk rock or anything that was happening in the ‘70s, we were out in the hinterland. All that I could listen to was AM radio and ‘Seasons in the Sun’ was a massive hit, but lyrically its dealing with death, ‘Goodbye to you my trusted friend.’ He’s dying and I’m a young kid thinking ‘Why’s this guy dying on the radio? What’s he dying from?’ It was so much more than the syrupy, ‘I’ve got love in my tummy’ stuff that had come out of the ‘60s. “And this mystery, I was old enough to know what dying meant, but too young to understand that you could sing about it. Yet here was Terry Jacks singing this very sad, almost suicidal song and it hit me like a ton of bricks. now I started not only having to process music that I was deeply in love with, but also processing lyrics at seven or eight. The idea of the mystery within the song, that there were not only unanswered questions, but the biggest question, death. That’s what rang my bell, it was existentialism in a three-and-a-half-minute pop song. “I didn’t have all the tools to process it artistically at my young age but I knew it was deep, it was important and it was really, really sad. It was almost like a traumatic moment in early childhood that you didn’t experience directly, but indirectly it shook your bones, like the death of a relative you’ve barely met. You can tell everyone around you is ringing like a brass bell from it and that was something I got from that song."

"There are certain records that I know a lot about and others that I don't, and I think this one, for me, purely on a symphonic, musical level, it just is one of my favourite classical pieces. I think it's especially about the first movement, where the double-basses come in barely audibly, and it builds and they're just repeating their pattern. There's something about pattern in classical music, and that's why I've chosen Steve Reich as well: phrases and themes that get repeated and then get others on top that repeat, it's a cyclical thing that starts to happen with this harmony and rhythm, and it fascinates me. I also love double basses being bowed, there's just something about that that really pleases me. It builds into this huge thing and there's this moment where there's just one piano note, like a summoning, and the woman's voice comes in. I just think it's really soulful. I could've chosen Ravel's Bolero, which is also a really popular piece of music, but it's another one of my absolute favourites because again it's repetitive, it's almost like dance music, it's a repetitive theme that builds and builds. When I was going to see Underworld, off my face, in a tent - I think there's something similar, when instrumental music just builds and builds and builds. [Górecki] is really interesting technically as well as emotionally, which is the theme of this whole discussion almost: my greatest love is of people that have managed to walk that line between technical, competent songwriting or structure or understanding the art form and understanding the craftsmanship and at the same time imbuing that with reality and grit and fucking true connection to soulfulness and the universe. You can make a person cry because of what you're doing. That combination is just dynamite, isn't it? There's nothing better. You can sit in a room making a lot of avant-garde white noise and wanking over yourself, that's fine, or you can make amazing, soulful pop songs. Surely the artist's job is to be a consummate craftsman but within that be a complete child, innocent of expression and tapped in."

"I have a Polaroid of Kurt Cobain on my kitchen corkboard. It's him holding a kitten, two of my favourite things in the world: Kurt and kittens, the two 'k's! I was deeply in love [laughs] with him, on a hormonal level, for a long time. But I think in terms of what he taught me as a budding creative person and an angsty, very troubled teenager. It sounds really cheesy, but he got me through many many days of bunking school. When I think of Bleach, I've just put [points to phone] "bunking school", that's basically what I did. Just that first track 'Blew', there's that bass sound [sings], and it was just so dirty and rank and then there's feedback and his voice - [sings] "NO RECESS!' - on 'School'. What was so exciting about the fact that they had become so loved and so big was that they didn't compromise any of that aggression, anger and rawness. I just love people that become really successful by not compromising anything, and being completely true to their own spirit. At that time, I was starting to writing books of poetry and play guitar in my bedroom. I'd pretend to get the train to school, and then come back in and climb through the window and just spend all day with Bleach and Incesticide on a tape, and I'd just turn them over and [listen to] 'Dive', 'Love Buzz' and 'Floyd The Barber'. It was just the ability to play this album as loud in my bedroom as I possibly could and just scream along to it, and just feel there was a little soulmate, who had this similar thing, just guiding me through. I think that visceralness really gave voice to something that I was finding difficult to express and because I was finding my own singing voice, and very shy about it, it was like really nice to be able to not have to sound, as a girl, pretty and nice - all the female musicians like that, they're very beautiful, but to get that kind of guttural, animalistic scream was really liberating."